Lessons learned from 2020 about AMS strategy

The past year has taught us that much can change quickly within our organizations and without notice. That’s why it is important to proactively invest in the people and resources that can help your organization weather times of disruption, be agile and embrace change, while remaining competitive in your industry. The days when organizations were discussing AMS support requirements and focus on stabilizing their environment, fixes issues and keeping the lights on are long gone. As we’ve continued to assist our clients with their HR and Financial application management needs, we’ve learned a few important lessons about how proactive strategic planning and thoughtful investment in your ERP is even more important than ever as we navigate our businesses through the end of 2020 and into the new year and way of doing business.

The time to reassess your AMS strategy is now

While your organizational AMS strategy for your HR and financial systems may not have previously been top of mind, the days of a reactive team serving only to keep your Workday tenant running with minor bug and update fixes are long gone. Your AMS strategy must be proactive, holistic in approach and ever anticipating the next potential threat to your business operations. Take time with your team to reflect on any issues that may have come up in the past year, how you were able to resolve them, gaps you had or will have going forward in resources, skills sets, processes or functionality and how you can revise your AMS strategy to ensure next time you’re better prepared.

Your technology is only as good as your people

So make sure they are properly supported. The next Workday release, business process error or business need is right around the corner and if your team is not equipped to handle it, a minor issue can become disastrous. Investing in the proper training and outside support enables your team for success and allows them to better support your workforce.

Your ability to leverage data matters

If you have the data but you can’t access it or use it to make informed decisions when you want and how you want, it’s useless to you and your business decision makers. Ensuring you have, and know how to use, the analytic capabilities you need in a time of disruption or transformation can be the difference between the ability to make an informed business decision quickly and taking a shot in the dark.

Your people will engage more frequently in user-friendly technology

As more and more organizations rely on their Workday system to keep their virtual workforces organized, informed and safe, it’s important to make sure your employees are trained and aware of their self-service capabilities. The more your employees can do for themselves means the more time your HR and finance teams have to work on projects strategic to the business and the less they have to triage user issues. Bringing in an outside AMS partner to assess your tenant can assist you in making the needed adjustments to ensure your Workday system is as user-friendly as possible.

System optimization isn’t one and done

As your business needs and workforce change, so must your technology. Just because you’ve had success in optimizing your Workday tenant prior to a merger or acquisition, a shift in business operations or a change in your company structuring doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from assistance making sure all these new pieces come together as seamlessly as possible and could save you time and money retroactively addressing issues that pop up in the future.

Road mapping matters

Your initial Workday deployment is a huge achievement. Once that excitement wears off and you’ve fallen into a good rhythm with your new technology it might be hard to carve out time to assess what comes next. Bringing in a partner who can assist you in determining the next modules to deploy based off your budget and business needs leaves you with a plan to follow as you expand your Workday capabilities and helps you to proactively prepare for any business operation changes without sacrificing your ability to modernize your organization with Workday technology.

Don’t forget automation and analytics

No longer are AI and Analytics a nice to have, they are now a non-negotiable in today’s technology landscape. Having a plan for incorporating automation analytics and AI into your overall technology roadmap will support your ability to do more with less and leverage your AMS team to support key business initiatives and projects versus just the day-to-day technology support.